I just hacked together a little RSS tool using python. All my script does is grab an RSS file from a remote location (in this case, our weblogs site), parse it, and output a defined number of entries as HTML into a file. This file can then be included by another site. The reason I mention it was because of the sheer ease of setting this little system up. A big part of the ease was due to me using Mark Pilgrim's ultra-liberal RSS parser (there are other RSS tools written in python). I was able to write a little tool to accomplish my goal in under 30 lines of code(probably could have been shorter if I was a better python programmer!). Only took about a half hour (again...if I was better...). I did quick download and install of ActivePython on our Win2k server, and a quick setup of the windows-equivilant of a cron job (to run the script every hour). All in all, it was pretty slick. I'm impressed with how easy python is to develop in, the quality of open-source modules for it, and the utility of RSS...
Posted by Karl
May 8, 2003 08:28 AM